Jesus of Nazareth, or thereabouts

In the last of four book excerpts, religious scholar Diarmaid MacCulloch traces the deep historical and philosophical roots of the Christian faith.

And so to Bethlehem of Judaea, where Jesus was born in a stable because there was no room at the inn.

Or perhaps not. We learn of these events within four books of the Christian New Testament, credited with authorship by early followers of Jesus called Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. They shine four different spotlights on the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ, and all four were probably written not less than half a century after his death. They are collectively called the Gospels, a word which started life as the Greek for “good news,” evaggelion.

Significantly, the first Latin Christians did not seek an exact equivalent in their own language and simply slurred the word with a Latin lilt into evangelium. Many modern languages have in turn borrowed from the Latin: Hence, in English, “evangelist” and “evangelical.” Far away from Mediterranean society in England, during what we misleadingly used to call the Dark Ages, Anglo-Saxon scholars were more adventurous than the early Christian Latin-speakers: They considered the etymology of the original Greek and came up with their word “Godspell” once more meaning “good news” – Gospel.

This care to find a special name for the books of Matthew, Mark, Luke and John reflects their oddness. Biographies were not rare in the ancient world, and the Gospels do have many features in common with non-Christian examples. Yet these Christian books are an unusually “down-market” variety of biography, in which ordinary people reflect on their experience of Jesus, where the powerful and the beautiful generally stay on the sidelines of the story, and where it is often the poor, the ill-educated and the disreputable whose encounters with God are most vividly described.

In the Gospels, events in historic time astonishingly fuse with events beyond time; it is often impossible to define a distinction between the two. The only other books specifically to be called Gospels apart from the canonical four are their literary rivals or imitators, written solely by Christians for the same purpose: to tell stories about the life and resurrection of Jesus. The so-called “Gospel of Thomas” is one of the better known, since its collection of sayings attributed to Jesus resembles more than most the four Gospels contained in the New Testament. By transfer, “Gospel” describes the whole message contained in all the biblical books, not just in the Gospels: the multiform, restless story of good news which is Christianity.

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Two out of four Gospels, Matthew and Luke, have narratives of Jesus’s birth in Bethlehem at the end of the reign of King Herod the Great (73-4 BC). But outside those narratives, there is much to direct the alert reader to a contrary story. John’s Gospel is most explicit when it records arguments among people in Jerusalem, once Jesus had grown up and his teaching was making a stir: Some skeptics pointed out that Jesus came from the northern district of Galilee, whereas the prophet Micah had foretold that the Jews’ Anointed One, the Messiah, would come from Bethlehem in Judaea, in the south. The other three Gospels — even the Gospels with stories of his birth in Bethlehem — repeatedly refer to Jesus as coming from Galilee, or more precisely from the village of Nazareth in Galilee.

In fact, outside the text of the two birth narratives, the Gospels do not refer to Jesus being born in Bethlehem, nor does any other book of the New Testament.

Luke’s birth narrative, the more elaborate, explains that Jesus’s parents travelled from Nazareth to Bethlehem at the time of Jesus’s birth because they had to comply with the residence terms of a Roman imperial census for tax purposes, “because he was of the house and lineage of David.” This does not ring true: The idea is based on Luke’s ancestor list for Jesus, designed to show that he was linked to King David a thousand years before, which was a matter of no concern whatsoever to Roman bureaucrats.

Implausibilities multiply: The Roman authorities would not have held a census in a client kingdom of the empire such as Herod’s, and in any case there is no record elsewhere of such an empire-wide census, which would certainly have left traces around the Mediterranean. The story seems to embody a confusion with a well-attested Roman imperial census that certainly did happen, but in 6 AD, far too late for the birth of Jesus, and long remembered as a traumatic event because it was the first real taste of what direct Roman rule meant for Judaea.

The suspicion therefore arises that someone writing a good deal later, rather hazy about the chronology of decades before, has been fairly cavalier with the story of Jesus’s birth, for reasons other than retrieving events as they actually happened.

This suspicion grows when one observes how little the birth and infancy narratives have to do with the later story of Jesus’s public ministry, death and resurrection, which occupies all four Gospels; nowhere do these Gospels refer back to the tales of birth and infancy, which suggests that the bulk of their texts were written before these particular stories. We must conclude that beside the likelihood that Christmas did not happen at Christmas, it did not happen in Bethlehem.

Why, then, were the stories created? One motive for locating the birth in Bethlehem might be precisely to settle the argument noted in John’s Gospel about Jesus’s status as Messiah of his people Israel: It answered the skeptics who pointed out the problem with Micah’s prophecy.

But there is much else to these stories, all reflecting the deepening conviction among followers of Christ that this particular birth had profound cosmic importance. Matthew’s and Luke’s preoccupations diverge — one would not realize from listening to the harmonization of fragments of them in Christian Christmas celebrations that the Gospels agree in hardly any detail about Jesus’s infancy. The narrators intend to recall more ancient stories in the minds of the hearers by applying them to the coming of Jesus the Christ. So Matthew raises an echo of Moses by sending Jesus and his parents in flight to Egypt from the murderous King Herod: Once more, a birth is imperilled, innocent children are killed by a worldly ruler, and yet the one child survives in Egypt to be a deliverer for Israel.

Matthew and Luke provide two ancestor lists for Jesus which agree very little in the personnel involved and whose distinct patterns seem to have different preoccupations. Christians quickly felt uncomfortable about these divergent families, producing explanations that, as recorded by the early-third-century scholar Julius Africanus (“the African’), are masterpieces of far-fetched genealogical speculation.

Matthew’s list unconventionally includes descent through women, unlike Luke’s; a strange bunch those women are, all associated with eyebrow-raising sexual circumstances and also, Jesus’s mother, Mary, excepted, with non-Jews. The messages here seem to be that Jesus (and maybe also the circumstances of his birth) transcends petty conventions of behaviour in Jewish society, and also that even while he is a Jew, his destiny is confirmed as a universal one, not simply for the benefit of Jews.

The same thoughts run through the whole Gospel narrative which is given Matthew’s name: Of all the Gospel writers, he is the most concerned to define how far and in what ways the Christian community for whom he is writing can depart from Jewish tradition while still observing its spirit. His Jesus says that he has come to “fulfill” Jewish Law, not “abolish” it, and piles up quotations from the Law, only to plunge far beyond them in rigour, punctuating his thrusts with the repeated phrase, “But I say to you …”

Furthermore, Matthew’s and Luke’s ancestor lists are in their present form pointless. They claim to show that Jesus could be described as the Son of David; in fact Luke goes further, taking Jesus back to Adam, the first man. Yet they do this by tracing David’s line down to Jesus’s father, Joseph. Both then defeat their purpose by implying that Joseph was not actually the father of Jesus. Matthew does it by abruptly ending the genealogical mantra “father of” after the generation of “Jacob the father of Joseph,” continuing “Joseph the husband of Mary, of whom Jesus was born.” Luke is more directly indecorous by calling Jesus “the son (as was supposed) of Joseph.” These rather lame phrases cannot be other than emendations of the rival texts, designed to accommodate the rapidly growing conviction of Christians that Jesus’s mother, Mary, was a virgin in human terms and became with child by the Holy Spirit. Matthew describes the announcement of the miraculous birth as being made to Joseph, but Luke gives the experience to Mary, and it is striking that Christian devotion and Christian art have overwhelmingly concentrated on Luke’s account of an “Annunciation” to Mary and have ignored Joseph’s equal revelation. It is a surprising reversal of the normal priority offered to men’s experience in the ancient world, and it reflects the early growth of a complex of Christian emotional and devotional needs attached to Mary and her role in Christ’s story.

In the centuries which followed, Christians went further, coming to insist that Jesus’s mother remained a virgin throughout her life. A proclamation of Mary’s perpetual virginity meant commentators clumsily making the best that they could of clear references in the biblical text to Jesus’s brothers and sisters, who were certainly not conceived by the Holy Spirit.

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The changing perspectives on Jesus emerged out of what is likely to have been a cacophony of opinions and assertions among his first followers, trying to make sense of the extraordinary impact of this Jewish teacher. Most of the cacophony is lost to us because it does not survive in written form, but we can glimpse in the biblical text one view of Jesus as the coming Messiah from David’s line, or as another Moses, the ancient Deliverer. These perspectives were not lost, but voices emerged to acclaim Jesus as having a Father who was divinity itself, and these voices are now those overwhelmingly dominant in the New Testament.